NPR's Digital News and Visuals Teams To Merge

March 9, 20188:00 AM ET

In an email to staff, NPR Managing Editor Sara Goo recently outlined new structural changes in the newsroom to further reflect and bolster our goal to bring a strong digital audience to our most important journalism and storytelling.

Colleagues,

I'm excited to announce that Digital News and Visuals team will formally merge into one team, effective immediately. Although we have worked side by side for a long time, a unified team under a new structure will enable staff to better collaborate and learn from each and to grow skills that will open up new career paths. These changes will also provide the newsroom and other groups across NPR with clearer points of contact for our digital work. What does not change is our goal to bring a strong digital audience to our most important journalism and storytelling.

Keith Jenkins will serve in a new role as Director of Digital Content, bringing his years of management experience to guide our content creation on all of NPR's digital platforms. Keith's deep experience guiding the video team, photo team and news apps and graphics will expand to also include all our strategy for growing digital audience on NPR.org, social media and our expanding interest in smart speakers. He will continue to report to me. Keith's direct reports will include Desiree Hicks, Nicole Werbeck, Constance Miller, and Becky Lettenberger.

Desiree Hicks will continue to oversee digital's relationships with the radio shows, in addition to taking on a new role serving as our primary editor of Cover Stories on NPR.org, a new project we expect to launch this spring. Desiree is one of our most talented editors and will work with me and Gerry Holmes to identify magazine-quality, visually-driven and deeply reported written stories to our online audience. She will continue to oversee a team of editors and producers whose role is primarily related to our radio shows. This team includes Maureen Pao, Heidi Glenn, Wynne Davis and our stellar weekend team of Maquita Peters and Emma Bowman and our copy editing team: Susan Vavrick, Pam Webster and Patricia Cole.

Nicole Werbeck is being promoted to Senior Supervising Editor overseeing both the Photo and Social/Engagement teams, which will now be combined into one powerhouse group. She'll draw upon her experience in both areas to guide these teams, who have great potential to do more collaborating together, especially on visually-driven social media platforms and NPR.org. In addition to the photo team, reporting to her will now include engagement team editors Steve Mullis, Carol Ritchie, Nicole Hernandez, Chris Hopkins, Doreen McCallister and James Doubek. Senior Social Media Editor Lori Todd will also report to Nicole. Amy Morgan is being promoted to Senior Engagement Editor, focused on making sure that our most impactful work online reaches the biggest audience, reporting to Nicole. With our stories reaching people on so many platforms, she will serve as our connection between strategy and implementation of best practices to drive audience engagement. The NPR photo team also welcomes Laura Beltrán Villamizar as our new Projects Picture Editor. Although we already announced her arrival some weeks ago, Laura started this week and will work closely with Nicole to help shape our enterprise visual journalism with the shows, desks and the rest of the digital news team.

Constance Miller, who has been managing our news apps and graphics team, will also receive a title change to Supervising Editor for Digital Development. Constance will continue her work with her current team but will also extend to work across all of digital, helping to identify and build tools and systems to make our news gathering more productive and efficient. Digital producer Renee Klahr will also join Constance's team from Hidden Brain, bringing her special skills in creating bite-size visual storytelling on social media platforms. She will now expand her portfolio to support more storytelling for the digital content team.

Becky Lettenberger will continue to lead our video team as Supervising Editor, Video, overseeing a New York and Washington crew of videographers, producers and editors. With Mito Habe-Evans, she has led the team to create unique video series' that represent NPR's journalism and storytelling, working with many groups across news, Programming and Music.

Please join me in congratulating this team on their new roles and in leading NPR digital content.

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